I’ve been marvelling at the Britishisms that have been picked into this, but ‘I shouldn’t ought to shake his hand’ takes the cake.
TobyBartels
Karma: 3,251
I think that you can probably rewrite this comment without the rot13, except for the last bit.
Gur checbfr bs gur svany rknz jnf gb frr vs jr ernqref pbhyq svther bhg gur fbyhgvba gung Ryvrmre unq va zvaq nyy nybat, abg n jnl sbe hf gb trg Ryvrmre bhg bs gur ubyr gung ur unq qht Uneel vagb.
I suppose that someone ought to mention here that when it says above the author loves reviews, he means that he loves reviews on fanfiction.net. Not that he would necessarily mind reviews here, of course.
Sure, that explains why the story was written with this flaw, but it doesn’t remove the flaw. But I don’t have a better suggestion.
Well, right, when one speaks of the disaster of war, the first thing that comes to mind is of course the senseless and wanton scattering of perfectly correct pebble piles. Further thought reveals other problems, such as a reduced population leading to fewer future correct pebble piles and so forth, but that’s not the visceral image that you get when contemplating the horrors of war.
Voted down this comment, because 2 other people voted it up and didn’t even have the guts to admit to it.
But it seems weird to me that they have computers and algorithms if they can’t figure out this pattern. That messed with my suspension of disbelief for a bit.
Voted up this comment, for reasons that should be self-evident.
Yes, the only logical course is to remove all except the outer two quotation marks.
The ironic thing about those exceptions is that bringing in Barbour’s timeless physics is arguably itself one of the errors. In Harry’s explanation of how he was able to perform partial transfiguration, there’s nothing from Barbour except the phrase ‘timeless physics’; Harry’s explication of that, as enforcing a relationship between separate time slices rather than performing a change, is the standard idea of a block universe, going back at least to 1908.
If quantum mechanics allowed for small violations of energy conservation (which sometimes people even say that it does, on short time periods, although this is not really correct), then McGonagall’s tranformation would still violate physical law as we know it. In physics, you don’t always push everything down to the most fundamental theory, which is a good thing, since we don’t actually have a most fundamental theory of physics. There is no such thing as ‘our best [single] model of reality’; there are some ways in which our quantum models are (so far) worse than our classical ones.
It’s a reference to SCP-231.
This doesn’t seem to me to address MinibearRex’s proposal.
We don’t want to extrapolate the sociopath’s volition; we want the sociopath to extrapolate our volition. The idea is that sociopaths have experience with thinking objectively about humans’ volition.
No, he’s certainly not completely wrong, but he’s bringing up irrelevant complications and missing the main point. Quantum vs classical has nothing to do with it, for example.
I agree, brushing makes it harder for stuff to get caught in my hair when it gets thrown at me.
Probabilities aren’t ontological; they’re epistemological. I agree with everything that Eliezer writes about that, probabilities are in the map, etc.
But remove that word; there is something ontological that assigns measurement outcomes when I make a measurement. Or to keep it simpler: when I make a measurement, the measurement outcome is ontological.
But at the same time, Harry tries several times to give Hermione her own agency and not reduce her to this role. Or at least he says that he’s trying to do that. He’s not very good at it yet.
Sure, the problems with the physics are right in there with bothersome things that Harry says that you could still justify, starting with the non sequiturs about conservation of energy when McGonogall turns into a cat.
I disagree with su3su2u1 (the tumblr author) about levitation; that doesn’t violate conservation of energy if it’s mediated by a force, and why shouldn’t it be? On the other hand, turning into a cat violates conservation of mass (or would appear to, and that should be easy to check with a bathroom scale), which (via E = mc²) translates into a huge energy violation. But bringing up the quantum Hamiltonian? FTL signalling? Su3su2u1′s analysis is correct.
The justification for this is that Harry is 11 and has only a vague idea about how physics actually works. But then it’s hard to tell what we should learn from Harry and what we should ignore. (For that matter, I don’t even know if Eliezer knows better than Harry or not.)
You can’t go to the Moon, you need a rocket ship! Do you have rocket ship, Potter? I bet you do.